 |
Search this site |
 All Rights Reserved World Copyright supporting advertisers helps to provide an income for this website this page last updated August 8, 2008 |
This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. One man's moderation ... ... is another's extremism By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 798 words Publication date: December 10, 2006 Last year my reluctantly atheist mother read the first four columns on God would be an atheist… and resolved never to read another. My writing was too aggressive, she said. I didn’t ask which column had offended her. It could have been my depiction of the evolution of religion or my assertion that tradtional religious morality is moral only in name. My analysis of the Noah myth was designed to produce laughter not outrage, and my wondering how Creationists explain the koala’s long journey from Mount Ararat in Turkey to eastern Australia made a serious point. The most likely offender was my riff on the importance of men in many religions. Noting God’s preference for priests with testicles, I suggested solemn rituals to reassure congregations that their priest, imam or rabbi was appropriately equipped. Others have been turned off by my musings. My ex-partner, an agnostic, thinks I should not disturb those who are comforted by religion. I occasionally lose subscribers when I skate into explicitly sexual territory – although I would prefer people dropped out after reading one of my less well argued pieces. Nor am I the only author to give offense. New York times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently vented his anger at Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and other members of the “Atheist Left”, accusing them of being as intolerant as the religious right. As proof of their (im)moral equivalence, Kristof pointed out that atheist Mao and Stalin were responsible for millions of deaths. In rebuttal, Harris and others pointed out that unlike Christians, Jews and Muslims who kill for their faith, no leader in history has killed to impose atheism on their or a neighboring people. Do those of us who argue consistently and repeatedly against religion stand on the fringes of society? Will we – should we – be relegated to a footnote in history, like the Wobblies, the Shakers and American Tories? Few people see themselves as extremist. Like the one soldier in the platoon marching on the wrong foot, we are convinced that everyone else is out of step. And we can always point to people or ideas who are more extreme than ourselves. After all, I don’t want to ban religion. I just want to make it a crime for an adult to involve children in any form of religious activity, including the teaching of Creationism or “Intelligent” Design. I don’t want to tear down churches or destroy religious artefacts. Some of the grandest architecture and most beautiful paintings and sculptures have religious themes. I don’t want to burn any Bibles or Korans, but I do want them shelved in the fiction section of bookshops and libraries. My greatest anger is for those who kill and wound in the name of faith but I would treat them no differently in the judicial process. Individuals would be tried and sentenced by regular courts, and political leaders by the International Court of Criminal Justice. (The sooner America stops claiming exemption from the ICCJ, the more effective that court will become.) In a free society, the behavior of individual adults is of no concern to the state or their neighbors, as long as that behavior respects the freedom of others and as long as the vulnerable are protected. I have no more objection to Christians worshipping God than I do to marijuana smokers, model railroaders or students of Klingon. Reluctantly, however, I accept that these views, based on sound principles of reason and freedom, are considered extreme by the majority of Americans. But like every other extremist, I want my views to become mainstream. I want the Pope and his equivalents in other religions to be relegated to the fringes of society. So I write this column to propound my views and persuade others to accept them. (Given its association with religion, I avoid the word “convert” when discussing atheism.) But how effective is GWBAA…? While it may make some believers reconsider their faith, none of the Christians who write to me are convinced by my arguments. Yet it would be surprising if they were. Faith is the product of years of indoctrination and the development of a specific mindset. An 800 word column by someone who thinks very differently from you is unlikely to change your mind unless it is already moving in that direction. I suspect that most of my readers know that God is an illusion. But I hope I still provide at least some of you with the tools we all need to chip away at the ignorance and superstition which surrounds us. We can reassure ourselves that much of the mainstream began at the edges. Civil rights, heliocentricity and Barney were all once minority preoccupations. Today atheists are extremists, but one day, hopefully soon, we will be recognized as voice of moderation.
Custom Search
|
If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |